Former colonial powers send military “advisers” to Libya

[Hannah Bell]

Following Britain’s lead, France and Italy announced Wednesday that they too will be sending military “advisers” to anti-Gaddafi forces in Libya, bringing the three former colonial powers back into the region they once ruled...

The escalating intervention by the major European powers has immense historical significance. For the first time since World War II, Italian troops are being sent into Libya, a territory that Italy first invaded 100 years ago. Today they go in the name of “humanitarianism”. A century ago, Italy justified its invasion of what were then the Ottoman provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica in the name of its “civilizing” mission.

For the Libyan people, this invasion produced a tragedy of genocidal proportions. Between the onset of Italian colonization and the routing of Italy’s army in World War II, 42 years later, fully one half of Libya’s population was murdered, starved to death or driven into exile. Resistance to Italian rule was met with systematic aerial bombardment—for the first time anywhere in the world—of the civilian population...

The fascist regime of Benito Mussolini saw Libya as a “population colony”, along the same lines as its ally, Nazi Germany, viewed the territories to its east as “living room” for the German people. And it utilized similar methods. In 1930, 100,000 people, mostly from nomadic tribes, were herded into concentration camps, where at least half of them died. A year later, the Italians captured the leader of the anti-colonial resistance, Omar Mukhtar, and hung him before an assembled crowed of 20,000.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/apr2011/pers-a21.shtml

[Alamuti Lotus]

1. K&R -- was just about to post this myself

For the Libyan people, this invasion produced a tragedy of genocidal proportions. Between the onset of Italian colonization and the routing of Italy’s army in World War II, 42 years later, fully one half of Libya’s population was murdered, starved to death or driven into exile.

Resistance to Italian rule was met with systematic aerial bombardment—for the first time anywhere in the world—of the civilian population. Caravans, villages and even livestock were destroyed from the air by the Italian military, which also employed poison gas.

The fascist regime of Benito Mussolini saw Libya as a “population colony”, along the same lines as its ally, Nazi Germany, viewed the territories to its east as “living room” for the German people. And it utilized similar methods. In 1930, 100,000 people, mostly from nomadic tribes, were herded into concentration camps, where at least half of them died. A year later, the Italians captured the leader of the anti-colonial resistance, Omar Mukhtar, and hung him before an assembled crowed of 20,000.

Italy’s record of fascist colonialism, however, was little different in its effect from the “democratic” variety practiced by France and Britain. In neighboring Algeria, which France ruled from 1830 to the Evian agreement of 1962, colonialism was similarly brutal and indeed, near genocidal, in its suppression of any resistance by the population.

On May 8, 1945, known as VE Day, for Victory in Europe, as crowds in Europe and American celebrated the defeat of Hitler’s regime, French forces in Algeria carried out atrocities that rivaled those of the Nazis. Popular demonstrations by Algerians calling for independence were met with massacres that claimed the lives of tens of thousands. Algeria’s post-colonial government estimated that a total of 1.5 million Algerians were killed during the long struggle for independence.

And Britain, which divided the region up with France in the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 and subjugated Libya’s neighbor, Egypt, for 70 years, has a similar record of tyranny, torture and wholesale killing throughout the Middle East and Africa. In Kenya, it herded some 320,000 Kikuyu into concentration camps, where thousands were killed and tortured. And it employed similar methods in its dirty war against the independence movement in Aden until it was forced out in 1967.

This is the real record of Libya’s would-be “liberators,” who claim to be motivated purely by humanitarian sympathy and concern for civilian life.